DROBO Chassis and Extra HDDs

[Enquiries]

Hello! My name is Ty. I'm with a film/TV prod company and appreciate what you do.

Recently, we upgraded to Synology for main stuff and took a bunch of DROBOs offline, along with the HDDs in them(perfectly fine and work). I was wondering if there a way to turn an old DROBO (5n, 5D, etc...) into a simple "external drive enclosure"?
Or better yet into a 3rd party RAID capable "external drive enclosure"? Like, just clearing all DROBO software.
We have several Drobo cases/"chassis" just sitting here and the HDDs do go with them but we really want to get out of the Drobo software side. Do you know if this conversion is even possible??

Alternatively, we'd just buy some OWC drive enclosures but want to save the money. We'd use them as backups btw.

[ed]

Hello Ty! Thank you for reaching out, and we appreciate your support! Regarding repurposing your old DROBO chassis and HDDs, unfortunately, it is not possible to turn an old DROBO (5n, 5D, etc.) into a simple "external drive enclosure" or a third-party RAID capable enclosure by just clearing the DROBO software. DROBO does not provide direct access to the HDDs without their proprietary software. If you wish to use the HDDs in a different RAID-capable external drive enclosure, you would need to consider other options like TerraMaster or OWC drive enclosures.